Cleanly, Through The Heart
by Honey and Wine
Summary: Some may turn their eyes away, some may not.


Twyla looked across the table at her husband. Reic hadn't touched a bite of his food; he hadn't even made an attempt, not even to make her happy. He merely sat at his usual place on the table, his chicken scraps and rice untouched. Reic was staring at her. His eyes were too wet, his cheeks sunken in, his skin sallow and pale.

He would not stop staring at her.

In the fireplace, twigs crackled and popped. It suddenly seemed far too hot in the small farmhouse, though Twyla was sweating. She tried to focus on her meal, but the food tasted like grit in her mouth. Her appetite had gone the way of her husband ….

Reic made a clumsy attempt to pick up his spoon. He failed. It clattered off the plate onto the floor. He made no attempt to pick it up, which was just as well. He would have failed at that too. Twyla averted her eyes, staring at the plate as intensely as he was staring at her.

A shudder wracked her body.

* * *

They were married when Reic was twenty, just after Twyla's sixteenth birthday. It would have been a magical day, the best of Twyla's life, had it not been immediately after the death of her father. The wedding had been attended by many smiling but red-eyed friends and family members. Many years later, when Twyla lovingly went over her memories, she had only dim recollections of the food and dancing, but a sharp angled image of her mother, sitting in a place of honor weeping.

The old witch-woman who lived in the valley told Twyla she would never bear children, and sure enough she hadn't. But the couple had managed to have a good enough life. Reic worked in the fields, Twyla look in sewing and laundry, and they managed to afford their little house, and (usually) enough food too keep their bellies full. Twyla never complained, at least.

It had been a warm June morning when Reic had been called out to the road with the other men from the village. They were being paid to help move some lumber for a new house across the valley. Chatting and joking, the men jumped on the cart full of wood and began the journey.

Halfway down the road, the rope that held the logs down frayed and snapped from the constant jostling. Reic saw, and reached to catch the rope, but his timing was just a few seconds too late. The log broke loose, and before Reic could grab onto the side of the cart he lost his balance and was trapped beneath the heavy timber.

In a matter of seconds, Reic went from being Twyla's husband, a good farm-hand, a fine fiddle-player when he wasn't too shy, to being a thin bag of meat and bones, a smear on a country road. Despite the best efforts of the town's doctor, even a charm sent by the witch-woman, Reic gasped his last breath on that road, three miles away from his wife.

When Twyla was told, she took a long, gasping breath. Her shaking hand reached up to her brow and twisted a coil of hair, an ancient habit left over from her girlhood. Her face crackled like glass, then snapped. The mask she wore, the tough-skinned and hard-working farmwife, the woman whose rough calloused hands could handle anything, fell away. Once again Twyla was sixteen, and her father was laying in his bedroom gasping out his last breaths. Once more her mother was slipping her cracked fingers around Twyla's shoulders and whispering that if she would just marry the boy, it would make the family so much happier. And it was her wedding night again, and she was confused and sad and hurt, pretending this ache between her legs was what she wanted. She dropped onto her knees and clamped her hand over her mouth to stifle the long, keening wail that broke away from her control. It was high-pitched and wild, an animal, pain, dying, bones-snapped and breath-stolen sound.

Then she stopped. She got up off her knees and adjusted her shoulders. She slipped on her mask again, stepped back into the only role she knew how to play. Her voice cracked, but she still barked out funeral instructions. Twyla just didn't have that much time for grief.

* * *

Reic was buried on the western hill, looking out over the valley where he had lived his whole life. It was a cold morning, but still sunny. Twyla stood by the grave, examining the meager ritual that would condemn her man to the ground. Ages ago, when she had still been young enough to wear ribbons in her hair, a priest from a cult in the next big-town-over had come to the village and had converted the valley, including Twyla's family, to his strange faith. That year Twyla's aunt had died, and the funeral had been a spectacle. Woman moaned by the casket and ripped out their hair, men shouted religious verses and stamped their feet. That was the way to die, Twyla thought. After the priest had been proven a charlatan, the village became weary of faith, and funerals were dry and without meaning.

Maybe, Twyla thought, it was better that way.

With no flourish of the hand, with no mystic words or ashes thrown, Reic was put in the ground. The villagers looked on, pity making their eyes shimmer, thankfulness that it was not their husband, their son, their brother. They whispered sympathy, letting Twyla see how much they said the ached for her. They shook their heads, they wiped their eyes, and then they walked away, work waiting for them back home.

Twyla stayed by the grave watching them shovel dirt over the wooden coffin. Her heart ached, and some part of her wanted to stop, push away the dirt, open the lid and crawl into the coffin. She imagined the body, heavy and limp, the flesh starting to rot sickly-sweet. She imagined her nails digging through the tissue, pressing herself to the empty shell while dirt and death weighed heavy above her.

She whispered goodbye, a short prayer to whatever might be calling to her man's soul, and left the grave.

* * *

Twyla wanted to spend her first night as a widow alone. It was the first night she had spent in the narrow wooden-framed bed by herself, the first night without the weight and gravity of a large male body.

She ate a good meal of the cold funeral meats her neighbors had brought. She then sat down to work on the quilt she was knitting for her niece's baby, a patchwork of whatever scraps she could find. The baby wasn't due until mid-winter, so Twyla took her time as she lovingly worked the scraps into a simple pattern.

The fire began to burn low, and Twyla's old eyes lost their battle to see the stitches. She set her work aside and began to prepare for bed. She was interrupted, though, by a series of sharp raps at the door.

Expecting to see one of her neighbors returning for another sorrowful visit, Twyla pulled the heavy door open.

It was Reic.

Her dead husband was standing at her doorstep.

His hair and clothes were muddy, fingers bloody with a few twisted at weird angles. Bits of leaves and grass stuck to the mud of his clothes, telling the tale of the long walk home. His eyes were lifelessly shiny but wet, so wet they made squelching sounds when he blinked.

And he stared at her.

Twyla examined this thing in her doorway, this thing who had shared her life and her bed for over twenty years.

"I think you'd best come inside," she said.

* * *

The mage trudged up the hill, and Twyla followed dutifully after him. She was nervous, put-off by the wizard's air of superiority and harsh instructions for her. Yes, she was a farmwife, and poor, but still, must he speak so commandingly? But, she supposed, what did she know of wizards and their ways? Maybe when one spent so long studying the dark arts this mien of authority was the reward for such hard work. And it wasn't as if she could just send him back.

Immediately after Reic's unexpected (and unexplained) visit Twyla had searched out the old witch-woman as soon as she could. All girls went to the hag periodically for herbs and such to help control the whims of the moon. Twyla had needed to go less than others, since she was infertile. Thus, the visit to her was strange and unfamiliar, a scrap of memory from the dream of her early marriage the only thing to guide her. And that visit hadn't been pleasant.

When confronted with the dead man, the hag had merely shaken her head.

"There's nothing I can do," she rasped. "You'd better write to the Conclave of sorcery, they can deal with such things better than I can."

"But won't that be expensive?" Twyla wrung her hands, looking at her blinking, staring husband.

"Sometimes they fix these situations as a public service," the hag shrugged. "If you have problems, send them to me and I'll negotiate on your behalf."

There had been no problems, thankfully. Twyla's letter was pleading and urgent, but still containing her vain promise to pay if asked. She had no way to such, but she found it impossible to send the letter off without including the promise. The thought of taking charity disturbed her, especially in her widowed state (well, partially widowed state).

Before the week was out, a man in dusty red robes came trudging up the road, asking for her. She met with him in the village's tavern, eager and somewhat frightened. He had been cold and formal, showing her his credentials and insisting they meet by the graveyard shortly before dawn. He told her, in so few words, he already knew the details of her case and only needed a short spell and her assistance to put Reic back in the ground. Twyla left the mage then, walked the half-mile back to her home, sat down just inside the door and began weeping. Then she settled in to sleep, since she would have to get up at such an ungodly hour.

That night – very early morning – Twyla and Reic met the mage at the foot of the hill, a short walk from where Reic had been previously buried. The mage had asked to examine Reic, which consisted of holding the tavern-lent lantern to the dead man's eyes and watching him jerk back with pain when the light hit him, and snapping the skin of his arm away from the bone, checking for texture and color, he said. After the mage had sufficiently examined the dead thing, he told Twyla that Reic's resurrection had been caused by what he called "a minor manna-field disturbance," that such things were common this time of year and that she had no cause for concern. When asked how long this would take and how big her role in laying him to rest once more would be, he coldly said they would be finished long before the cocks in the field began growing, and her part was short. The mage then handed her a short, sharp dagger, and told her to keep up.

They began the ascent.

Reic's grave had not been filled since he had clawed his way out of it. The wood coffin was obscured by dirt, mud and weeds, the tidy resting place now sinister and forbidding. It looked more like a grave than Twyla thought she could stand.

"Stand here," the mage said, pushing Twyla to the foot of the hole. He placed Reic in front of her, facing into the mud and worms from which he had come.

And then Reic did a strange thing. He turned around in place, not awkward and haltingly, but collected, more like the man he had been. And he said to her:

"Twyla," voice dirty and ugly like that grave, "I don't want to go."

Twyla's heart stopped. Her chest felt tighter than she could handle, and all of a sudden the world swam. Her conviction was falling apart.

"Never mind him," the mage snapped, his hand clamping her shoulder. "It is a mercy to send him back. You can't live with him walking beside you like this." Twyla looked at him pleadingly. Reic's eyes squelched. "If you don't do this now, you'll regret it. When his skin slides off the bones, when his organs burst, when the smell is so foul it follows you wherever you go, you'll regret not doing this. No matter how much he begs."

Twyla looked at her husband, and then nodded to the mage.

"Fine, then," he said; and pointing to the hand that held the dagger, "Stab him. Once, cleanly, through the heart."

Twyla's hands shook. Tears sprang up from her eyes, poured down her cheeks.

"Please, sir," she trembled, "don't make me do that to him."

"Woman," the mage eyed her disgustedly, "there is a skeleton in an alleyway in one of the slums of Sanction, one who was just like your husband once. It clatters its way down the streets at night, stumbling and falling and making a terrible racket. No one on that street has slept in years. Nobody dealt with the damn thing when it was prudent to do so, and now it would be such a chore to put it to rest no one has the time or the energy. And it kept me awake for weeks. Now, do something smart, for the first time in your life. End this here."

Twyla looked up at the corpse.

She thought of her wedding night, that body on top of her, not minding her pleas to _slow down, please. _She thought of every morning she made his breakfast, of every morning he didn't thank her. She thought of the afternoons where he was grumpy and sore from work, snapping at her to make his damn dinner before the sun came up again. And the bruises, and the broken bone she nursed in quiet, and the witch's fingers spreading her thighs, reaching inside her (_pain!) _telling her she'd never have children. The punch in the stomach she told no one about.

And the knife came down.

* * *

The mage left the woman there by her husband's grave. His body was mutilated and shredded, torn by the softness of his flesh and her anger, her well of hate. He left her crumpled in the mud, stained with thick black blood, sweet and foul with rot. Sweet and ugly, just like her life had been. He was at the foot of the hill before her sobs were out of earshot.

He advanced to the footpath that would lead back to the village, when he heard:

"It must be nice."

"What?" The mage whipped around.

"It must be nice to be a piece of shit Conclave brat who gets to torture old women with impunity."

Before the mage could react, a piercing pain shot through him, shredding the skin from his bones, bursting his organs into blue-hot flames. He screamed and tore at this skin, but it melted under his fingers. He collapsed, and felt the earth lurch away from him, his body sinking, sinking, sinking ….

Raistlin Majere turned away, looking back up the hill. Then, he disappeared.


End file.
